Anuj @ ColdFusion, Flex and some more….

I have heard a lot about Ant for years now but being a CF developer, never really had the need to use it, or I must say, never bothered to use it. However, recently, I read some blog posts about this and I was very impressed by its power and the opportunities it opens. So I decided to give it a try. Because I use Eclipse for development, it made my life easier as it comes with the Eclipse installation. All I had to do was to create a new Eclipse/CFEclipse project and throw in a build.xml file and then rock n roll.

As my first attempt with Ant, I decided to work on a build file that would take all my source files from a folder, zip them up and save the zip file into a backups folder giving the zip file a timestamp based name. Sounds very easy to do with a CF script but this time around I was gonna try to do this with a Ant build file.

Here is what I did :-

1. Create a new Eclipse Project(I called it AntProject)
2. Create a folder(srcFiles) and put some files in it.
3. Create another folder (backups).
4. Create a blank build.xml in the root of the Project.
5. Copy the following code to the build.xml file.

Thats it! You can now run this project by right clicking on build.xml and then “Run As - Ant Build”
That should open up your Console window when you run this but to open the console window manually, you can do this.
Window -> Show View -> Other -> General -> Console.

If everything goes fine, you should see a zip file in the backups Folder. Really Cool! I am impressed. Now only if I can figure out how to do that each time I close my Eclipse without having to run it manually.